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Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt once quippped that “every young person… will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood" in order to escape the "youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.”

The European Union's highest court this week acted on Schmidt's concerns, requiring Google and other search engines to restrict searches on the names of private citizens that turn up information those private citizens would prefer the rest of the world didn't see. The decision highlights large and longstanding differences between how Europeans and Americans view fundamental values including individual rights, privacy and the role of government and dominant telecoms companies in information policy.

Where Europeans see the "right to be forgotten," many Americans see George Orwell's memory hole. Where Europeans seem to have faith in the ability of regulators and de facto monopolists like Google and to protect the privacy of private citizens, I think most Americans accept the fact that the Internet is a wide-open place where new entrants can pop up at any time.

The decision treats search engines like publishers, with the power to pick and choose what other people can see when they type in an individual's name. That conflicts directly with U.S. law, which protects the free flow of information through the First Amendment and relies upon tort law, primarily libel and invasion of privacy, to protect individuals. Search engines and Internet providers in the U.S. are generally protected from liability for passing on data unless they have direct knowledge it is false or violates copyright law. (Though Google, like most search operators, has mechanisms for requesting takedowns of copyrighted or private material.)

It's ironic that the flashpoint is the "right to be forgotten," since the U.S. for most of its existence has been a place where people come to put the past behind them. The country's strong protections against political persecution and liberal bankruptcy laws to allow them to escape crushing debts both served as powerful magnets for immigrants seeking escape.

How, then, could the U.S. get so far out of whack with Europe on personal privacy?

Schmidt: Change your name at 18? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Europe has long had a much different conception of privacy and how to protect it. The EU court technically was enforcing a 1995 EU directive on privacy that treats search engines as data "collectors" subject to regulation. But the decision has its roots in the older French concept of droit à l’oubli, or the right to oblivion. As this useful article by Internet-privacy experts Meg Leta Amrose and Jeff Ausloos explains, EU regulators have long been more concerned than their U.S. counterparts about personal privacy and the role of government in enforcing it.

The European Convention on Human Rights, adopted in 1953, explicitly introduced the right to "respect for private and family life." A 1981 provision specifically targets the automatic processing of data and the European Commission declared the right to be forgotten a a pillar of the Data Protection Regulation in 2010.

So the EU court's decision shouldn't have come as such a surprise to Google, given the explicit language that preceded it. That decision requires Google to take down data that are "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed." This mirrors existing EU regulations prohibiting companies from holding personal data for an unreasonable time.

In this case it was articles about the the 1998 repossession of a Spanish man's home. But the decision could result in large swaths of currently public information being removed from the view of European Internet users, although how Google, Yahoo and other search engines will accomplish this -- or how consistently the 28 member countries will enforce the decision -- is still unknown.

Will it create yet another World Wide Web, censored, like in China, to protect users from knowing too much? Or will it prove unworkable, as did Europe's generally toothless regulations on the long-term storage of personal data?

Privacy isn't the only area where European and U.S. views toward individual rights diverge. European law is more protective of individual creative rights, in a way that might strike Americans as paternalistic or interfering with other fundamental rights like property and the right of contract. In Europe, artists possess inalienable "moral rights" --- based again on the French "droit moral" -- over their creations that supersede copyright and allows them to prevent alterations that they think would show them in a bad light. In the U.S., artists can sell their works to the highest bidder with no strings attached, as many novelists have learned to their horror after watching their works translated into Hollywood films.

The right to be forgotten reflects a similar concern with how individuals are viewed by the rest of the world. It is to a large extent based on the right to have only correct information about oneself available to the public. Most Americans would understand that, in the context of requiring credit reporting agencies to delete incorrect records of unpaid debts, for example.